Our View: Holder policy deserves full support

Attorney General Eric Holder's order to relax penalties for low-level drug offenders to create a more efficient, effective and just drug policy was met with mostly positive response.

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Posted Aug. 14, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Aug 14, 2013 at 9:18 AM

Posted Aug. 14, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Aug 14, 2013 at 9:18 AM

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Attorney General Eric Holder's order to relax penalties for low-level drug offenders to create a more efficient, effective and just drug policy was met with mostly positive response.

Holder spoke to the American Bar Association in San Francisco on Monday, laying out statistics and explaining strategies that he hopes will eventually leave those who are a danger to society in prisons, and those who are a danger to themselves on the road to recovery.

There is bipartisan support for this approach, already in place in numerous states around the country. Even the likes of conservatives Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Americans for Tax Reform founder and tea party icon Grover Norquist find little fault with Holder's order to U.S. attorneys to steer away from charges with mandatory minimum sentencing and granting judges more latitude in sentencing low-level, nonviolent drug offenders with no gang ties.

Norquist's only complaint is that the move is about five years too late.

The drug policy change — one of the most significant since the government declared war on drugs in the 1980s — reflects the success seen in states that have already moved in this direction.

In Sen. Paul's Kentucky, for instance, Holder noted: "(N)ew legislation has reserved prison beds for the most serious offenders and re-focused resources on community supervision and evidence-based alternative programs. As a result, the state is projected to reduce its prison population by more than 3,000 over the next 10 years — saving more than $400 million." And in Texas, "investments in drug treatment for nonviolent offenders and changes to parole policies brought about a reduction in the prison population of more than 5,000 inmates last year alone."

And "similar efforts helped Arkansas reduce its prison population by more than 1,400," he said.

Project SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a group co-founded by former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy) has lauded Holder's action because it offers policy that relies on neither incarceration nor legalization.

Locally, Bristol County's Sheriff Tom Hodgson is aghast at the potential for courts to go easy on people dealing heroin to children, for example. Such a result would indeed be a perversion of the Holder policy, but we will have to trust that the courts, the district attorneys and the attorney general will properly handle each case, while watchdogs such as the media and victim advocates remain vigilant.

Our lone beef with Holder's address to the ABA is this statement: "As the so-called 'war on drugs' enters its fifth decade, we need to ask whether it, and the approaches that comprise it, have been truly effective."

With all due respect, Attorney General Holder, we already know that the War on Drugs has been far from "truly effective," in fact we believe it to have been a waste of hundreds of billions of dollars and an immeasurable squandering of human potential.

The new policy puts the human first, where substance abuse is concerned, with a proven model that is vastly more cost-effective than incarceration. Holder acknowledges there will be fits and starts in its implementation, as well as mistakes, but it is clearly a step in the right direction, and one that needed to be taken.